Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s

Kathleen M. Blee

Excerpts: pages 39-41

ACTIVITIES

It is difficult to compare the political practices of the women's and men's
Klans, as both
varied considerably across the nation and over time but the national agendas of
each
organization give some indication of the differences. The political agenda of the
men's Klan
ranged from infiltration into legislative and judicial politics on the state,
municipal, and county
level to acts of violence and terroristic intimidation against Jews, Catholics, and
blacks. Many
Klansmen, though, used the KKK as primarily a male fraternity, a social club of
like-minded
white Protestants.

The women's Klan similarly showed a range of activities and purposes. On a
national level,
the women's Klan worked to legitimate the violence and terrorism of the men's
order. It
published and distributed a detailed guide to the proper display of the American
flag and a
pocket-sized version of the U.S. Constitution and circulated a card reminding
Protestants to
attend church faithfully (see photograph 5); each item prominently displayed the
WKKK logo.
The WKKK involved itself in national legislative politics, although without much
success. It
actively supported the creation of a federal Department of Education to bolster
public schools
and undermine parochial education and opposed U.S. membership in the World
Court. Although
it claimed to be interested in safeguarding white Protestant children and the
home, the WKKK
opposed a 1914 bill outlawing child labor on the grounds that it was "a
Communistic,
Bolchevistic scheme." That same year Klanswomen were active in blocking an
attempt by
antiKlan forces to introduce a plank in the national Democratic party platform
condemning the Ku
Klux Klan.

At times the women's Klan sought to portray itself as an organization of
social work and
social welfare. One national WKKK speaker announced that she left social work
for the "broader
field of Klankraft" because of the Klan's effectiveness in promoting morality and
public welfare.
Many chapters claimed to collect food and money for the needy, although these
donations
typically went to Klan families, often to families of Klan members arrested for
rioting and
vigilante activities. A powerful Florida WKKK chapter operated a free day
nursery, charging that
Catholic teachers had ruined the local public schools.

Some WKKK chapters ran homes for wayward girls. These homes served
two purposes: to
protect the virtue of Protestant women who were tempted by a life of vice and to
underscore the
danger faced by delinquent girls placed in Catholic-controlled reform schools.
The Shreveport,
Louisiana, WKKK chapter, for example, based its fundraising for a Protestant
girls' home on the
story of a woman whose unhappy fate it was to be sent to a Catholic reform
home after being
convicted of selling whiskey and prostituting her teenaged daughters.

Another activity of many WKKK locals was the crusade against liquor and
vice. WKKK
chapters worked to "clean up" a motion picture industry in which they claimed
Jewish owners
spewed a steady diet of immoral sex onto the screen. Other chapters fought
against liquor, as
evidenced by the case of Myrtle Cook, a Klanswoman and president of the
Vinton, lowa, WCTU,
who was assassinated for documenting the names of suspected bootleggers. In
death, Cook
was eulogized by Klanswomen and WCTU members alike; all business in Vinton
was
suspended for the two hours of the funeral.

WKKK chapters in many states were active also in campaigns to prohibit
prenuptial
religious agreements about future children, bar interracial marriage, outlaw the
Knights of
Columbus (a Catholic fraternal society), remove Catholic encyclopedias from
public schools, bar
the use of Catholic contractors by public agencies, and exclude urban (i.e.,
Jewish and Catholic)
vacationers in majority-Protestant suburban resorts.

Some WKKK locals, though, functioned largely for the personal and
financial success of
their members. F. C. Dunn of Lansing, Michigan, made a fortune after
introducing her invention,
a new antiseptic powder, at a local WKKK meeting.

Klanswomen tended not to be involved in physical violence and rioting, but
there were
exceptions. In the aftermath of a 1924 Klan riot in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania,
Mamie H. Bittner,
a thirty-nine-year-old mother of three children and member of the Homestead,
Pennsylvania,
WKKK testified that she, along with thousands of other Klanswomen paraded
through town,
carrying heavy maple riot clubs. Morover Bittner claimed that the WKKK was
teaching its
members to murder and kill in the interest of the Klan.

The activities of the women's Klan were shaped largely by the existing
political agenda of
the men's Klan. It is not accurate, however, to portray the WKKK as a dependent
auxiliary of the
men's order. Klanswomen created a distinctive ideology and political agenda
that infused the
Klan's racist and natavist goals with ideas of equality between white Protestant
women and
men. The- ideology and politics of Klanswomen and Klansmen were not
identical, though at
many points they were compatible. But women and men of the Klan movement
sometimes found
themselves in contention as women changed from symbols to actors in the Klan.

The difference between the women's and men's Klan grew from an
underlying message in
the symbol of white womanhood. By using gender and female sexual virtue as
prime political
symbols, the Klan shaped its identity through intensely masculinist themes, as
an organization
of real men. Clearly, this was an effective recruitment strategy for the first Klan.
But in the
19:20s, as both financial and political expediency and significant changes in
women's political
roles prompted the Klan to accept female members, an identity based on
symbols of masculine
exclusivity and supremacy became problematic. In addition, if Klansmen
understood that
defending white womanhood meant safeguarding white Protestant supremacy
and male
supremacy, many women heard the message differently. The WKKK embraced
ideas of racial
and religious privilege but rejected the messages of white female vulnerability. In
its place
Klanswomen substituted support for women's rights and a challenge to white
men's political and
economic domination. The next chapter further examines these contradictions.